The Wrong Choice
by EmmBee
Summary: The moment would always haunt her. The little mermaid makes the wrong decision: she kills the prince. Oneshot.


**Author****'****s Note: A lot of people I know say that the little mermaid ****should**** have killed the prince at the end of the story. While I personally disagree, it did get me thinking: what if the mermaid **_**had**_** stabbed the prince the morning after his wedding? Then, with all the tenacity of an interesting what-if, the thought bugged me until I wrote it down. This is what came out. It might be a little melodramatic in places, but I had a great time writing it.**

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The moment would always haunt her. She had known it would that morning, as she stared down at the bright red blood spurting up to stain her pale arms, as she saw her own hands wrapped around the dagger now lodged in his chest.

But by then it had been too late. The deed was done, and blood was creeping toward her bare feet. She hadn't had the time to stare at the scene around her, and she had hauled herself on her own red-stained arms off the edge of the ship as soon as her legs closed up into fins once more.

Touching the water was the last moment of peace she would ever have.

Her sisters greeted her with absolute joy, entirely unaware of the thing she had done, even though they had been the ones to explain how it would happen, to hand her the dagger and beg her to do it.

She wished she could believe she did it for them, because she loved them and wanted them to be happy again. She wished she could believe she did it for her father and grandmother, because they had missed her to the point of death and she couldn't bear the thought of them suffering from their grief any longer. She wished she could believe she did it for her people, to end the tension her absence had caused in the kingdom.

But all those reasons were lies. The plain and honest truth was, she did it for herself, because, in one single second of terror, her own fear of dying had overwhelmed every other thought and feeling in her, and she had shoved the dagger down with all her strength. Straight into his heart.

She murdered him. No matter how her sisters and father and grandmother tried to soothe her with reasons, that fact never changed. She. Murdered. Him. And those three words never left her alone.

At first, the pain and guilt was almost tolerable, tempered as it was by her family's joy. Her father and grandmother lavished her with attention, piled her plates with all sorts of underwater delicacies—though nothing was as good as chocolate ice cream or roasted chicken. Her sisters fought to be near her and wouldn't release her hands for days—though their pale, cold fingers were nothing like the touch of his warm lips. There were moments at first when she thought that it might have been the right thing to do, when she asked herself what the life of one human was worth compared to the happiness of her entire family.

But it didn't matter what her family said, what justifications she gave or values she assigned, because, ultimately, it would all come back down to those three words: she murdered him. Her continued existence had cost his life.

The moment never left her alone. She would be tending to her long-neglected flowers, a bright red petal would fall against her arm, and suddenly she was back in the tent staring at the blood spurting up onto her pale skin. She would be sitting at dinner, she would pick up a crab claw, and suddenly the tightly-closed claw would become a twisted silver dagger.

She was the only one who seemed changed by the fact that she had taken his life to save her own; her family was quick to settle back into the routine she remembered from before her first journey to the surface. But the moment her family's extra attentions ended, the moment her sisters and father and grandmother began to take her presence for granted and stopped telling her how much they loved her and how glad they were that she was back, the pain and guilt of that moment started to grow. For the first time she could remember, she dreamt, and the dreams were what humans called nightmares. She would dream of him dancing under fireworks, his dark eyes smiling—he had such beautiful smiling black eyes—as he twirled with her around the deck of the ship. And he would grin at her the grin that he reserved for only the best and rarest occasions, that cheerful, mischievous grin that she loved more than anything, and she knew that he was happy.

Then dawn would color the clouds red, and she would plunge a twisted silver dagger into his chest.

The dream came in many different varieties: sometimes he would be dancing with his bride, sometimes with his mother, and she would stab him from behind. Sometimes they would be watching fireworks instead of dancing beneath them. Sometimes they would be in a church, or on horseback, or sitting together on the steps of his castle. But, no matter the location and activity, the dream always ended the same way. With a dagger buried to the hilt in his chest—it didn't matter anymore that it never actually went in so deep—and blood beginning to spread in a great red stain across his front, the smile would slip off his face and from his eyes, and he would hold her gaze with absolute seriousness. Then, so slowly that the motion itself was a kind of torture, he would take her hand, raise it to the dagger, and press her palm against the wound. "You wish me well," he would whisper, his voice strained from sincerity. "You wish me well, more than any of them."

Then, suddenly alone in the dark, she would look down and see her arms from fingertip to elbows stained with red blood that never came off her pale skin, no matter how often she washed or how hard she scrubbed.

She would wake up screaming his name. It never came out understandable—the loss of her legs did nothing for the restoration of her tongue; that piece of her would always belong to the sea witch. She would jerk awake from her dreams screaming, and her sisters would burst into her room, begging her to explain what was wrong. But she couldn't explain, and not just because she couldn't speak.

They didn't understand. They _couldn't_ understand. He had never been more than just a human to them, a human who had taken away their youngest sister. They didn't know him. They had never sat or danced or run through the snow with him. He was nothing to them; he was just a human. A curiosity, maybe, but nothing more.

Even if she had been able to speak, she would never have been able to make them understand why that one single moment, that one small motion, that one selfish act, haunted her so.

After a while, exhausted nearly to death by drowning in pain and guilt, she tried forgetting it, tried ignoring the way the moment turned even the most innocent actions into nightmares. She threw herself with absolute abandon into her family's routine, made up her mind that she didn't care anymore that she was a murderer. She was alive, even if he was not, and, by the Great Creator, she was going to act as though she enjoyed it. She began wearing gold in her hair and oysters on her tail, never mind that the gold made her head feel almost too heavy to hold up and that the oysters clamped to her scales made her tail ache almost as badly as her feet ever did. Those were pure, simple, tolerable pains. She started flirting with every merman who looked her way, working with and playing up her inability to speak. The furious activity worked surprisingly well: the dreams eased in severity, and her flower petals and crab claws stayed flower petals and crab claws. Though her indiscriminant flirting ended with her married to the most boring merman in her father's court, she acted the dutiful wife—appearing at every court banquet and celebration with a smile on her face and a kind gesture for everyone.

Everyone thought she had finally moved on.

But every night, as she lay next to the husband she didn't and couldn't love, she would think about what she had done, and the memory would surface as vivid and horrifying as ever. She would see again the blood staining her arms and realize again that she had murdered him. In one moment of panic, the fear of death had overwhelmed everything else, and she killed him so that she might keep living that shallow, empty thing she couldn't call life.

And, just before she drifted off to sleep, she would wish that she had died instead, that she had thrown that damned dagger into the sea when she had the chance.


End file.
